


the Devil's kitten

by Naraht



Category: Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner, Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1930s, Caves, F/F, F/M, Gen, Satanic Practices, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 17:56:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Hilary sells her soul to the powers of darkness and becomes a witch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the Devil's kitten

'She caught herself thinking that it was too young to be taken from its mother. But the thought was ridiculous. Probably it had no mother, for it was the Devil's kitten, and sucked, not milk, but blood.' – Sylvia Townsend Warner, _Lolly Willowes_

'It was as if a voice whispered, “Command that these stones be made bread,” and one felt the power, but the voice might be from heaven or hell. She closed her eyes, and took the power from its unknown source.' – Mary Renault, _Return to Night_

'It is a terrible thing I have done, out of weakness and self-love. It is the sin of witchcraft. I have betrayed him to the power of darkness which I could have destroyed.' – Mary Renault, _Return to Night_

***

Witches, so Hilary had believed, were meant to spend their time gathering and brewing herbs. If not the classic mandrake, belladonna and pennyroyal, then at the very least cowslip and dandelion wine, homely concoctions which she associated with her eccentric Aunt Lolly (not really an aunt at all, but some sort of cousin once removed, an obscure Somerset offshoot of the luxuriantly branching Mansell family tree).

In the two years since her self-rustication in Gloucestershire, Hilary had possessed neither the time nor the inclination to go about collecting herbs in hedgerows. Her childhood interest in botany had lapsed unremarked, once she had discovered other occupations more absorbing, and she felt not the slightest interest in reviving it.

Therefore she could not possibly be a witch.

Standing in her dispensary, surrounded by the familiar tools of science and reason – scales, burners, pipettes and vials – Hilary told herself this, and was reassured. It was time she was leaving, anyway. She had come into the dispensary with no particular aim, moved only by the desire she always felt at the end of a surgery to make certain that everything was in its place. 

As she turned to go, Hilary's eye was caught by a bottle on a nearby shelf. A deep, cobalt blue, it was lit by a shaft of sun from the window. _Atropine sulfate_ , the label read. _For use in compounding prescriptions only._

It was as if an enchantment had been taken off her eyes – or, perhaps, put upon them. Blinking, Hilary gazed again at the familiar, well-ordered shelves of her dispensary, and saw there all the richness of hedgerow and field and woodland. Atropine, hyoscine, hyoscyamine, derived from the mandrake root, henbane, deadly nightshade. Ergotamine, from the ergot fungus (similar alkaloids could be found in the morning glory). Tinctures of all descriptions and uses: belladonna, opium from the poppy, digitalis from the foxglove. She was not so removed from nature as to fail to recognise the sources of the medicines that she prescribed and used every day.

Though they might be contained within bottles and vials and packages, the most modern formulations ordered straight from Burroughs Wellcome or Beecham, Hilary possessed, in short, a pharmacopeia which would have been the envy of any fifteenth-century herbalist, and sufficient evidence to convince any avid reader of _Malleus Maleficarum_.

She took a step backwards in horror, bumping into the rolling chair which she sometimes brought through from the examining room next door. She ought not to have done; the dispensary was too narrow for it, having been converted from a larder by Hilary's predecessor when he established the surgery. Her annoyance at her own carelessness – she might, if she had fallen, have broken any number of bottles – allowed her to take hold of herself.

Sighing deeply, Hilary bit her lip and put her hands in her pockets. She looked through the window at the sunny, ordinary street outside. The district nurse, passing on her bicycle, gave Hilary a cheerful wave.

It was, of course, all nonsense. She had allowed herself to become overtired; there was no other explanation. She checked her watch. Quarter past eight. Long past time to be heading home. She could look forward to a quiet, reassuring evening spent in Lisa's company, without any hint of the supernatural.

***

"I decanted my elderberry wine today," said Lisa. "Would you like a glass?"

"I didn't know you went in for that sort of thing," Hilary replied, still unsettled from her vision in the dispensary. She realised, too late, that she had replied without thinking. _Yes, thank you,_ would have done nicely. "Yes, thank you," she added apologetically. "That would be lovely."

Lisa brought out a clear bottle, sealed in the old-fashioned manner with wax. Within it the wine was a deep, rich red, almost the opacity of a good port.

"I don't inflict it on everyone," she said, pouring Hilary a generous helping, "but it seems such a waste not to use the berries when one finds them growing everywhere. It's the same with dandelions. My aunt taught me; she hardly drank, herself, but she spent half her spare time over it, and then gave most of it away in the village."

"Everyone seems to have an aunt like that," said Hilary, taking a sip of the wine – which was very good, if surprisingly strong – and thinking comfortably of her Aunt Lolly.

It had been a warm day, unusually so for late May, but with the last of the sun all the warmth had gone. Hilary was glad to have the chance to sit companionably with Lisa in front of a late, indulgent fire in the sitting room.

After a second glass of wine, her conversation turned to the subject that had been most on her mind. She addressed it at a slant, speaking of the Perpendicular nave she had been admiring the other week, and her consequent attempts to imagine Lynchwick in the days of the wool churches. Had there, she wondered, been witch trials in Gloucestershire?

"There was one around the time I was born," said Lisa, startlingly. "But the charges were thrown out. And it was on the other side of the Severn."

She spoke, thought Hilary, as though it might have been the moon.

They talked some time in general terms about the psychology of witch trials. Hilary talked, that is; it was not until some days later that she realised Lisa had contributed very little.

Without remembering the source, Hilary repeated an observation that had once been David's, saying that a great deal of the psychological force behind belief in witchcraft must have derived from spinsterly repression, and its social consequences. If that were true, how many more witches might one expect to have sprung up in the aftermath of the Great War? So she had observed to David at the time; he had merely laughed and said that, as she was not a spinster in any sense that mattered, she could hardly be expected to understand.

"Of course they say I'm one," Lisa observed placidly, "Rupert or no Rupert. Most things have been said about me by now. It hardly seems to matter whether or not they're true."

Now that she thought of it, Hilary remembered that Lisa had said something similar some months before. One had taken it, naturally, as an illustration of the parochial Gloucestershire outlook, and Lisa's reserve had left the matter there.

Tonight it was the same, for one could hardly ask one's landlady whether she practiced witchcraft, any more than one could ask whether her husband was faithful to her, or she to him.

"I suppose it's past time we got ready for bed," said Lisa, getting easily to her feet.

And Hilary followed her, putting all thoughts of spinsterly repression out of her mind.

***

In the small hours of the morning Hilary returned to a restless wakefulness, having slipped beyond the power of the elderberry wine. She turned on her side, tugging at sheets which seemed to have mischievously rumpled themselves solely to vex her, and prodded fruitlessly at a pillow whose soft down had turned itself all to quills and feathers.

Memories of the cave returned to her unbidden. Her evening with Lisa had not enabled her to forget what had happened there, only to put it out of her mind for a time.

In taking Julian into her arms, she had knowingly sealed her compact with the powers of darkness. The power conferred upon her in the chair she had been unable to refuse. She had grasped at it willingly, hungered for it: not merely power over Julian, but power for its own sake.

To have betrayed herself alone, perhaps she could have borne. If she had sold her soul two years ago, in exchange for a brilliant career in neurosurgery – one might say that this was no more than surgeons did every day. The thought of Sanderson or Ossian Bradford as a warlock had her smiling to herself in the darkness, not for its strangeness but for its truth. But what men could do as a matter of course was beyond the pale for women, and she had sold her soul, and his, in order to possess another, in order to claim his worship as her own due.

So she told herself; the worst of it was that one could hardly see what it all came to.

For a young man now purportedly under her power, Julian had made himself surprisingly scarce since that afternoon in the cave. In fact she had neither seen nor heard from him at all. A solemn vow never to acknowledge in the daylight world what covenants had been sealed in darkness, one could have understood, but this was rather taking things to an extreme. 

On reflection Hilary suspected that her young paramour of responding to a call far more ancient and elemental than that of the cave: his mother's. She would simply have to wait and see. Sighing, she turned over again and then started to sit up, intending to take a dose of Medinal.

Lisa reached out and drew her back into bed.

***

Julian returned to her eventually, as she should have known he would. 

He came to her room and, just as he had done in the cave, laid his head in her lap. Stroking his thick, soft hair, Hilary thought to herself that if this were the outcome of selling one's soul, one could sleep easily at night after all.

If she did not sleep that particular night, the reasons were more tangible. 

_Come, Helen,_ Julian whispered, taking up the part of Faustus, _come, give me my soul again._

It ought to have stung her conscience; she ought to have wished that she could obey him, that she could kiss him as he wanted to be kissed, as if the kiss could grant him not only love, but his very being.

It was impossible; she knew that now. She could give him nothing because she had taken nothing from him. He had been offered to her as her familiar, and her assent had sealed the contract. She had not betrayed him in the cave, for he had been already within the clutches of darkness. Most likely it had been so from the moment of his conception.

Having finished his recitation Julian now clearly expected applause. If the literal sort were impractical, then caresses would do. This boon she granted him.

"My darling," murmured Hilary. "My sweet."

It explained a great deal, she thought, that he had never possessed a soul to lose. Yet with his changeling charm he was beautiful nonetheless.

She drew his head slowly down to her breast. "My own dear boy."

***

After a few days it occurred to Hilary that she had not yet met the Devil face to face. Her surrender to the powers of darkness in the cave had been a purely anonymous transaction, a matter of business; one who buys government bonds does not expect to meet the Chancellor of the Exchequer thereby. But if the prince of darkness were truly a gentleman, could not one expect him to come and call?

Her imagination led her to envision him, not in the guise of a gentleman, but as one of the working men of the district. A gardener or a gamekeeper, a blacksmith or a poacher. Something along the lines, though she did not express it this way to herself, along the lines of a hero of a D. H. Lawrence novel. In the course of her work she frequently met this type of man. But though she treated their buckshot wounds, prescribed salvarsan for their syphilis and, not occasionally, set the broken bones of their wives, Hilary saw no marks of the demonic beyond the workaday suffering and cruelty that were the bread and butter of any rural GP.

Perhaps, she thought, the Devil did not exist after all. Perhaps the ranks of witches and warlocks were no more than another Church of England, clinging to beliefs which had faded away in the light of modernity. Her patience with witchcraft could be attributed to its lack of dogma, for if anything were expected of her beyond her initial sacrifice, she had not been able to discern it. There was, in short, a strange democracy in witchcraft which suited her independent spirit. But, absent the irrefutable power which she had felt in the cave, resisting all her attempts to gainsay it, she was left wondering what it all came to in the light of day. Or in the dead of night.

An obstructed labour had kept her busy from the early part of the day through till nearly midnight. She arrived home just as the grandfather clock in the hallway began to chime, which made rather a mockery of her attempt to shut the door quietly. She was just unbuttoning her tweed driving coat when Lisa came through into the hall, already wearing her own coat and shoes and pulling on a pair of leather gloves.

"Good," she said, "there you are. I was just about to go without you."

Dumb with fatigue Hilary did not enquire, for Lisa spoke as if this were an appointment long planned. She followed in Lisa's wake, obediently into the passenger seat of the car, and lost her way amidst the narrow country roads. Only when she climbed out of the car once again did she realise they had come to the Lynchwick golf course.

"This way," said Lisa quietly. 

She carried no torch but she found her path with the ease of one who has known a place since girlhood. Julian, thought Hilary, would have moved with an equal confidence. She felt a pang, wondering whether he would come to her room tonight and find her gone.

It was clear that they were not bound for the club house. The close-cropped sward of the links gave way to deeper grass that tangled around their ankles and drenched the edges of Hilary's skirt with dew. The path steepened. Hilary and Lisa linked arms and toiled upwards. Bushes plucked at their elbows as if imploring them to turn back while they could.

Their destination was, of course, the Lynchwick Beacon. There was nothing else about with the same elevation. Ahead and above, the shape of the iron age fort was silhouetted against the stars. And there was a flicker of firelight beginning to show. Someone had lit a bonfire.

They stumbled finally onto level ground. The bonfire was roaring now; even at a distance Hilary could feel the heat licking against the side of her face, unnaturally perceptible. There were people gathered around, some of them standing here and there, some of them dancing, some of them feeding the fire.

It was, in short, a Devil's Sabbath.

For a moment Hilary felt herself shaken, suspended between the cold wind and the heat of the flames. In the flickering darkness she recognised nothing and nobody. To believe oneself a witch was all very well, but what could she be doing here amidst these unknown followers of the Devil?

"One only turns up out of a sense of obligation, really," said Lisa in a low voice, a reassuring presence at her elbow. "These things are deathly dull. But it's best to make an appearance at least. We needn't stay long."

As Lisa led her towards the bonfire, faces began to come into focus. There was the district nurse, who smiled and greeted Hilary as cheerfully as though they had passed on the high street of the market town. There was Doctor Dundas, dancing in a slow, silent, courtly parade with Mrs. Abbott, who looked to be enjoying herself far more than she ever had done at the hospital Christmas parties.

Reclining on the grass at the far side of the bonfire, against the earthworks, were the mothers of Betty and Christine. Whether or not they were on speaking terms – under the circumstances, who could tell? – they were at least far more intimately acquainted than Hilary could ever have supposed.

In the surreal context of the evening, none of this seemed strange. It was as if Hilary were only now seeing beneath the surface acquaintances of the past two years to discover what she had known all along. Gloucestershire had finally accepted her as one of its own.

"This is extraordinary." 

"Didn't you have something like it in Shropshire?" asked Lisa.

"Not that anyone ever told me," said Hilary sharply. But she wondered whether her Aunt Lolly might not have said differently if she had been asked about Great Mop.

Although with notable exceptions – there were few representatives of the aircraft works, and no sign of the Theobalds – the attendance at the Devil's Sabbath seemed to be a fair cross-section of local society, from the gentry down to the worst families of the village.

Standing by the bonfire was the woman whom Hilary had delivered that evening, holding against her shoulder the wrinkled, tiny infant who was not more than hours old. Hilary found herself catching her breath, thinking of rituals of child sacrifice. But it was ridiculous, for surely no one attended a christening fearing that the priest might drown the baby in the font. No doubt the Devil was looking forward to welcoming another life-long worshipper into his fold.

A movement at the edge of the gathering drew her eye from the newborn. It was Julian, cavorting in the mask of a grotesque. Even with his face obscured, the fluid grace of his body was unmistakeable – to Hilary and, she imagined, to everyone else in attendance. The mask did nothing to conceal his identity; he could not have meant it to.

She walked forward slowly, intending to greet him and yet strangely wary of encountering him in this guise, with others present. No one seemed to be watching her, and yet one knew –

Hilary stopped dead. One ought not to think that; there was always someone.

Appearing as if conjured, Elaine Fleming stepped out from the shadow cast by the local blacksmith. She was dressed smartly in furs, as though on her way to dinner in Cheltenham; surely, thought Hilary, she must be too warm, for the bonfire was now roaring to its height. Not wanting to meet Mrs. Fleming without reinforcement, Hilary looked to her side, but Lisa had melted away. Perhaps the brush with the King's Proctor was still too close for comfort. There was nothing for it.

Mrs. Fleming was smiling at her, a correct, social smile that could not have been faulted in the most exacting of drawing rooms.

"Dr. Mansell," said the Devil, "how good of you to come to our little party."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lilliburlero for a quick beta. They very correctly pointed out that the wool churches came before the Henrician laws against witchcraft. I have left in Hilary's clumsy and historically inaccurate segue, on the theory that Hilary can be allowed to make the same mistake that I did.
> 
> Lisa is referring to the trial of Ellen Hayward for witchcraft in 1905. For more details, see here and scroll to the final article: http://www.deanweb.info/history7.html


End file.
